Oracle Blog

Walking the earth like Caine in Kung-Fu

Wednesday Sep 30, 2009

Sun has recently published a white paper that discusses how the Solaris OS will take advantage of the future Intel Nehalem-EX processors. With over 20 years of SMP expertise, what better OS than Solaris to run on top of Intel's future 8-socket, 64-core, 128-thread architectures? With features such as Memory Placement Optimization or Predictive Self Healing, the Solaris OS has the critical technologies necessary to large SMP architectures today. The paper discusses the collaboration between Intel and Sun to optimize Solaris for Nehalem-EX and leverage new features such as Hyper-Threading, QuickPath Technology, Turbo Boost Technology or I/O acceleration.

Thursday Jul 23, 2009

"Is Solaris better on AMD or Intel?" As a Technical Marketing guy working with the field and partners, I honestly cannot tell you how many times I was asked that question. The answer, as you most likely already know, is not a straight black or white type answer. Building the best performing solution depends on many components, from the processor architecture to the workload, including compilers and application optimization, type of I/O, network, storage, etc...

There are general rules of thumb, for example applications with a very high thread count and network I/O are likely to perform very well on Sun Chip Multithreading (CMT) Servers. However, as AMD and Intel architectures evolve, they become more and more similar in many respects (although the low level details and implementations are very different): NUMA architectures, multiple cores, 64-bit, integrated memory controller on cpu die, large cache, etc... therefore generic rules about which architecture performs better tend to turn into an infinite number of case by case benchmarks and proofs of concept.

Sun has been working for years with both Intel and AMD engineers to optimize the Solaris OS on both architectures. In order to help developers leverage these efforts, Sun has published BluePrints articles that provide technical details on how to take advantage of the optimizations for the latest generations of processors: AMD's Opteron 2400/8400 series (aka Istanbul) and Intel's Xeon 3500/5500 series (aka Nehalem-EP) . Although not a straight answer to my initial question, these documents provide developers and sysadmins the guidance they need to optimize the Solaris OS on the latest AMD and Intel processor generations.

So, which is best? How about you have the power of choice and decision. Whatever your choice is, Solaris not only supports it, it has been optimized to help you get the best out of it! Happy reading.

Tuesday Jul 07, 2009

In the BluePrints article "Deploying the AMP Stack in Virtualized Environments - Taking a Step Towards Cloud Computing", Thierry Manfé provides all the steps necessary to virtualize the AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack in Solaris Containers and getting ready to deploy AMP virtual servers as a SaaS (Software as a Service). From the creation of the first container to the installation and configuration of the AMP stack, all the commands are provided with detailed instructions and recommendations.

Thierry takes it a step further also providing best practices to efficiently manage virtual network traffic (using Project Crossbow) and to reduce deployment times by leveraging ZFS clones. This article will definitely help you get ready to take the AMP stack to the Cloud.

Sun BluePrints articles are free whitepapers, written by engineers, for engineers. Don't miss out, stay up to date and join the Sun BluePrint Community on Facebook or subscribe to the Sun BluePrints Community RSS Feed.

Tuesday Jun 30, 2009

Nowadays, most applications use a
database in the back-end, particularly Web-based applications. The
amount of time spent to process the
database queries becomes a critical factor for the overall performance.

The BluePrints article “Optimizing
PostgreSQL Application Performance with Solaris Dynamic Tracing” demonstrates, using multiple examples, how DTrace can be used to observe, analyse and
fix PostgreSQL performance bottlenecks. The paper shows for example how to analyze and fix slow queries or optimize the buffer cache usage, all
that live, without rebooting, recompiling, or even restarting the
application. Download this paper and improve your database performance without changing the hardware.

Sun BluePrints articles are free whitepapers, written by engineers, for engineers. Don't miss out, stay up to date and join the Sun BluePrint Community on Facebook or subscribe to the Sun BluePrints Community RSS Feed.

Monday Jun 15, 2009

The Solaris OS is optimized to take advantage of the Intel Xeon processor-based systems. The Sun BluePrint titled "The Solaris Operating System - Optimized for the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series" has just been updated with some of the latest improvements. Here are examples of what to expect from the BluePrint:

Increased Power Efficiency

An innovative Power Aware Dispatcher (PAD) has been
integrated into OpenSolaris, enabling Intel Xeon processor 5500 series
to stay longer in idle states (C-states), have better granularity in
power management (P-states). The Solaris PAD has
increased awareness of the Xeon 5500, such that
the workload can be efficiently utilized on available hardware threads,
with benefits for shared pipelines, shared caches, and shared sockets.
The Solaris kernel has the ability to utilize those parts of the
processor that are active, and continue to avoid doing work on those
parts that are powered down.

Writing multi-threaded applications

The Sun Studio compilers support the OpenMP specification version 3.0. OpenMP is an API that can be used to explicitly specify multi-threaded shared-memory parallelism in C, C++, and Fortran programs. OpenMP has a rich set of directives that the programmer can use to specify parallelism in a program. This allows creating applications that will take advantage of the parallelism offered by the Hyper-Threading technology from the Xeon 5500.

Automated Energy Efficiency

PowerTOP for OpenSolaris leverages the DTrace framework to quickly and safely analyze the system without impacting performance or service levels. It gathers information about processor idle and frequency states transitions and even allows a developer or administrator to observe Intel Turbo Boost Technology operation. Normally, it is difficult to know how fast a system with Intel Turbo Boost Technology is running, as this capability is determined by the Xeon 5500 power management system. PowerTOP will be able to monitor and measure Turbo Boost.